Sporting memories: getting duped into expensive football boots
I am adjusting my wording here because most of the comments I am getting are getting confused with my terminology since most of my audience is not North American. In this story football boots = soccer cleats and football=soccer.... just so everyone knows.
When I was young, as I have mentioned many times, I was very good at football. We called it soccer and honestly, I didn't even know that the rest of the world referred to it as football until I was in my late teens. What can I say? It was the 90's and the internet didn't exist on a large scale. I also wasn't terribly worldly, just like a vast majority of Americans at the time.
I never really paid much attention to brands of shoes or any other clothing for my football getups back in those days because with just whatever shoes on, provided they had spikes, I was already better than 90% of the people that I was on the field with. Then one day, and I am not sure how it happened, I developed an affinity towards Diadora shoes and clothing.
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The very first image that came up on my search was the exact pair of shoes that I owned, the Diadora Firenzes. These shoes were the very first sport shoes that I ever owned that were really expensive by my and my family's standards. At more than $100 in the early 90's, this was a crazy amount of money to spend on shoes. This is also not something that my family ever participated in but I must have been very convincing about how it was going to improve my performance that the parents buckled and bought them for me.
Truth be told I just liked the neon colors and thought they looked cool. I had no idea if they had any sort of performance edge and once I actually had them, I found out that not only did they not have an edge of any sort, but since they were new they actually resulted in horrible blisters on my feet for the first few months. I can't blame Diadora for this aspect of the shoes because at least in my own life, there is a certain time-period where all shoes, no matter who makes them, have to be "broken in" and adjust to my own foot size and width.
Prior to these shoes I had just worn any shoes but I think that wearing more flash shoes brought me more attention during games. The fact that I could have been doing the same thing with shoes where the labels had actually worn off of the boots didn't really register with me at the time because I was a teenager and sensibility hadn't yet started to register with my brain.
Wanting flashy shoes was nothing new in sports for me once I got to high school: The marketing that these companies do worked on a lot of kids across all sports. I think that basketball probably was the largest target as it seemed that almost everyone had Jordans even if they were terrible. I think one of the reasons that my parents agreed to the rather expensive purchase of the Firenze's was at least in part because at this point in my life I had all but abandoned all sports other than football.
As I have gotten older I look back on those times and realize how silly it was for me to "need" these expensive boots that honestly, didn't add a damn thing to my performance, they just made me feel good. In reality I really wanted to return to my old boots because at least for a few months, the Diadora shoes were quite painful to play in.
Later on in college our boots were all provided for us so I no longer had to worry about that decision or the expense associated with it. I don't even remember what the brand was but our kits all had to match so we were not allowed to choose what shoes we wanted to wear.
My devotion to Diadora was a silly one and a decision that I don't know where it came from because Diadora didn't really advertise in USA seeing as how it would have been a lost cause for them to try to compete with Adidas and Nike's budgets for exactly that sort of thing. Sadly, I think my major motivation for wanting these shoes was simply because they were more expensive than almost any of the other shoes and I believe that this is probably a strong motivating factor for almost everyone. Basically we are all idiots.
As time went on I think I learned a valuable lesson from this experience and have always purchased sensible shoes for every aspect of my life ever since then. Sorry Mom and Dad!
That is a really odd boot choice, but I had one teammate that was also obsessed with this brand :D I guess there is always one person who can appreciate the other brands as well :D
I think I chose it because I wanted to be different than everyone else. I don't really think about such things these days
I think you find a brand that are comfortable with and stick with them as you find out the hard way. I was with Adidas for years until I was getting stud pressure which can be painful. I bought a pair of Patrick's and they lasted a few seconds as the bottom fell off when running onto the field before the start of the game. I went back to Adidas after discussing the problem with the Adidas sport manager who sent me a pair of boots promising me that there would be no stud pressure issues. I stuck with them after that as no other sports company for boots came anywhere close. Nike wasn't big back then and even still wouldn't have been tempted. Having big feet was always a problem and normal shoes I have to take whatever I find. Normally sporting sales have all the extra large shoes on special and bargains can be found in my sizes. I say sizes as brands are not all the same and can be a few sizes different which is kind of odd.
Interesting that Adidas would put so much effort into helping a single customer. That's really great to hear. A friend of mine once went to some sort of specialized store where they would measure your foot very accurately and also do some fancy computer stuff to measure how you walk and run... like your gait or something like that... they they could "prescribe" the perfect shoe for you based on more factors than just what you thought looked cool and what brand loyalty you had. I'd never heard of such a thing before then.
Nice! My first pair of major boots were predators cause they were on sale at an Adidas outlet. I even went a size too small just cause they were special. That was the only way I could get the metal cleat version!
Metal cleats were banned for some reason in most of the leagues that I played in. Any idea why that might be?